Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in a scene from “Reacher” on Prime Video. This season of the series is set in Maine. Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Dave Sawyer was so surprised at what he heard during an episode of “Reacher” that he had to hit rewind.

“They started talking about Gorham and I had to go back to make sure I heard it right. You never hear Gorham in a TV show,” said Sawyer, 66, a lifelong resident of the town. “I thought that was definitely cool.”

Gorham is just one of several Maine locales — including some fictional — name-checked in the third season of the Prime Video action crime series “Reacher,” which began streaming Feb. 20. This season’s storyline comes from the seventh book in British author Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, “Persuader,” which is set in Maine and focuses on a Portland rug dealer mixed up in drugs and other bad things. Reacher, played by Alan Ritchson, is a former military police officer working undercover for the Drug Enforcement Administration who infiltrates the rug dealer’s inner circle as well as his coastal Maine mansion.

The town of Gorham is mentioned in a scene where a police officer talks about saving his pennies to buy a home there someday. With the median house price at $555,000 in Cumberland County, the onscreen remark drew more than a few chuckles from locals. Some took to Facebook, saying it would take him a very, very long time to save the down payment, especially on a cop’s salary.

“I laughed hysterically when I heard that,” said Janet McKenney, 68, who has lived in Gorham for more than 20 years. “It started a whole discussion with my spouse, about how maybe it’s cheaper to live in Gorham than it is in Portland, or it’s cheaper to live in Gorham than it is in Scarborough.”

But mostly McKenney and others were just excited to think that Gorham, along with other Maine towns and cities, had made it onto a hit action series.

“We’re a small state, so there’s always excitement when somebody mentions towns here, especially smaller towns,” said McKenney, who was director of library development at the Maine State Library in Augusta before retiring about two years ago.

Publicists for “Reacher” did not provide information about the Maine locations mentioned in the show. Some of the towns mentioned in the book include Portland and Kennebunkport. There are also mentions of rest areas on the Maine Turnpike in the novel, including one just north of the New Hampshire border.

Alan Ritchson, left, in a scene from this season of “Reacher,” set in Maine. Christos Kalohoridis/Prime

Mainers watching the show this season have also heard references to Pittsfield and Waterville. The series was filmed mostly in Canada, where the government provides financial incentives to filmmakers that are more lucrative than in many U.S. states – including Maine. Proponents of filmmaking in Maine have proposed bills in the Legislature to increase incentives here several times in the last few years, without success.

There’s a character in this season’s “Reacher” who also may sound familiar to Mainers. The Big Bad in this season’s storyline and in the book is Francis Xavier Quinn, a former military intelligence officer whom Reacher has crossed paths with before. Francis X. Quinn was also the name of a longtime Associated Press reporter who covered the state for many years while based in Augusta. He died in 2022.

Since “Persuader” was written in 2003, it’s possible Child was researching Maine and saw Quinn’s name on stories about Maine. Child has said in interviews that he’s always been fascinated with the idea of living a restless life, constantly moving around, as Reacher does. So he has set the 29 Reacher books all over the country and the world. Other U.S. settings and locales include Georgia, Chicago, Florida, New Hampshire, Texas, New Jersey, North Carolina, Colorado and Nebraska.

In the novels, Jack Reacher is a former major in the Army military police who has become a drifter, roaming the country, taking various jobs and working with law enforcement, and finding himself in dangerous situations.

This season of “Reacher” opens with Reacher apparently stopping the planned kidnapping of college student Richard Beck, the son of Portland rug importer Zachary Beck. In the book, Richard asks Reacher to bring him to his home in Abbot, Maine, which he describes as being on the coast between Kennebunkport and Portland (in the show, the fictional college town is called Abbottsville). In both the book and the show, Reacher is working with DEA agent Susan Duffy, played by British actress Sonya Cassidy, using a strong – and sometimes shaky – Boston accent. New episodes of “Reacher” on Prime debut every Thursday through March 27.

Before the TV series, there were two Reacher movies starring Tom Cruise: “Jack Reacher” in 2012 and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” in 2016. The first season of the show on Prime was based on the first Reacher novel, “Killing Floor,” set in Georgia, and the second season follows the story of “Bad Luck and Trouble,” set in California and other western states.

This season’s Maine setting was revealed by Ritchson on Instagram a little more than a year ago. He can be seen sitting in front of a plate of cooked lobster, with lemon and butter. After giving the news, he bites into the lobster, which apparently had been sitting around too long for his taste.

“And the good thing is, that means we get to eat a lot of lobstah,” said Ritchson, before dunking a piece of claw meat in butter and popping it in his mouth, then spitting it out. “It’s like ice cold — who eats cold lobster? Gross.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Alan Ritchson (@alanritchson)